Hospital-acquired infections every year cause up to 90,000 deaths, 2 million extended hospital stays, and over $2.6 Billion in medical costs, in the U.S. alone. Research has found that up to 90% of conventional stethoscopes in a hospital carry infectious bacteria. This is especially significant for patients in intensive care units. Currently, many hospitals put a cheap disposable stethoscope bedside in intensive care units as a means of limiting patient-to-patient transmission of infections.
Clinicians often avoid using this cheap stethoscope bedside because of either poor sound quality and/or because of the discomfort to putting a stethoscope many other people may have used in their ears. Instead, some clinicians either use their own stethoscopes, breaking the isolation barrier, or perhaps worse, they avoid routine stethoscope examinations.
Efforts to reduce hospital-acquired infections, however, have generally resulted in the design of inconvenient devices, and more important perhaps, at a cost of deteriorated quality of sound.